I know that sounds kind of irrelevant to shoe size maybe, but tofitness buffs like my friend and to fitness hangers-on like me, we knowthat your feet swell during the day, reaching maximum size some time inthe afternoon. Therefore, the shoes you buy in the morning won’t fitby 3 pm. At the time of our conversation, it was 3:45 pm, CST, and Iwas feeling the afternoon squeeze.

She nodded slowly and used her mock pedantic voice to say, “I see.”

“The shoe lady told me my foot was a wide now, but I said, ‘I havealways been a narrow. I will take a narrow.’”

At this new tidbit my friend exploded into stifled laughter--we were ina software training seminar—and she was writhing around trying not tofall off her chair or to laugh disruptively loud. But the hilarity wastoo great for her to resist.

“You just acted like a typical woman! You just insisted you wear adifferent size and got the wrong shoe!”

This was my moment of induction. As she continued with the bellylaughing, head bobbing, hair shaking enjoyment of my typicality, I gotvery serious.

“Oh my god.” My eyes got big, and I put my hand to my mouth in stupor. “I did just act like a typical woman.”

“Yeah! Ya did!” She sputtered her last chuckle.

I marveled at my own banality. And then laughed along with my friendat how ridiculous it is to think of me as 1. adult, 2. adult woman, 3.typical.

I got over the shock of becoming a typical woman, but it made me thinkretrospectively. I remember my hometown newspaper running tons ofsingle panel cartoons about prissy women shoppers insisting to the maleshoe clerk that she has always been a 6 and a half and is still this day.

In addition, the Al Bundy character of “Married, with Children” soldshoes for a living, and every customer I remember him interacting withpresented the identical scenario. A woman insists she must stuff hergiant middle-aged foot into the size she wore as a debutante. The jokeof these comic scenes is that the man knows better what the womanreally needs.

I remember the wrong shoe size gag in my hometown newspaper’s wordjumbles too. You have a cartoon, a riddle about the cartoon, andjumble letters from which to make words that then yield the clues tothe riddle. I can do this, as a new inductee, I can create thescenario. I’ve got a new riddle and cartoon already and waiting for anillustrator:

Two male sales clerks wearing ties are standing to the right in thebackground but are clearly visible and prominently dominating thescene. In the foreground, a seated middle-aged woman is surrounded byshoes and shoe boxes. She has a bouffant hair style and she’s wearinga dress. Though she occupies the foreground, she is in the left andbottom of the frame, in a diminutive corner of the cartoon, the men arethe primary focus. The customer is trying to force her larger footinto a smaller shoe. The man on the right says the riddle to his chum,“If that boat’s a size 6, then my dinghy’s a yacht!”